Talk:Ibanez Wiki Sandbox
This is an attempt to improve the Index page of the wiki. As you can see it doesn't display properly, in fact you have to edit this page, copy it, and paste it the "real" index page, then click "preview". The idea is to concentrate the content of this page and to get rid of many barely useful/ ambiguous links. The "Big picture menu" is gone, it takes a lot of space and you know that in 2016, many ppl use their mobile phone to access the internet. BUT the links of this "big picture menu" are not gone! They have simply moved to the 5 flashy icons just below. In the past this 5 icons were used to link to Portals (Series portal, Model portal, Parts portal etc -> see Portal:Main that is left unchanged). Now the icons lead to the categories, just like the "big picture menu" did before. Portals are badly implemented, and they compete with the categories that are working really fine, thus I took this direction. The following content of the page, "About the wiki" and "Blogs & activity" are still here, inserted into "wikiaboxes". The page is now very coherent, displaying the same font, same size, same style everywhere. I know that loosing the nice images of the "big picture menu" is a shock to everybody. Rest assured that I feel the same, it makes me feel that something is broken/bugged because I'm really used to it, like anybody else here. But I definitely think it gives a new starting point to help us browse the wiki a waaay more efficient way. To be discussed again :) EDIT: this is a preview of the page, without the display bug: --KainTGC (talk) 15:48, May 8, 2016 (UTC) Thoughts on proposed redesign Overall, I like your efforts to streamline and simplify the page. I rather like the "big picture" nav structure, but I agree that it really isn't all that functional. In terms of structuring the navigation around categories, I agree that makes sense as the content of the site stands today, but I continue to believe that (properly built) portals would provide a friendlier user experience as the categories tend to just be lists of links. Perhaps the short-term answer is to take another look at the Portal templates to see if they can be reworked to leverage and present category content in a more logical way. While my initial thought was that you may be going too far with this redesign, in some ways I wonder if you're not going far enough. For example, let's dissect the five main categories: guitar series, guitar models, parts, view and backgrounds, and expanded Ibanez universe. Obviously "guitars" is the most important category, but why is it broken up into "series" and "models"? Aren't series just groups of models? I mean, looking at the pages I can see some reasoning behind the distinction, but taking a step back and trying to put myself into the head of the site's "typical user" I'm not sure the distinction is important enough to merit two separate top-level categories. Then "parts" — how many users come here looking for information on specific parts used on Ibanez guitars? My guess is very few. It seems like any traffic that's going to the parts pages is coming from links within speclists. Then we get to the last two which are more confusing still. I don't have any real idea what "Views and backgrounds" is supposed to mean. At first I wondered if it was a repository of images that could be used for desktop wallpaper. Even now, it doesn't really mean anything to me. And lastly, "Expanded Ibanez Universe". Again, I'm stumped as to what that is meant to convey and why a site user would want to learn more about that. Now that I've spent the last paragraph tearing down the existing structure, what would I replace it with? Short answer: I don't yet know. In terms of buckets in which to put the site contents (i.e. the category hierarchy), I don't really have an issue with those five main buckets (although I would tweak some of the names). But perhaps the site's navigational structure doesn't need to mirror it's category structure. Maybe the first step is to try to think of what information is most likely to be of value to the typical site user. Are there particular articles that we should be highlighting? In terms of what people come here for, my guess is that most traffic is driven by people who are trying to learn more about a guitar they own or are considering to purchase, or perhaps to try to identify the model of some guitar. To that end, the Ibanez model numbers (perhaps with some freshening up) and the Ibanez serial numbers pages seem like good sources of information — maybe they should be prominently linked on the front page? Another thing to feature might be the current year portal (once that's done). What else? In all, I probably have more questions than answers when it comes to this sort of redesign. It really all ties back to the other conversations we've started about the structure/ taxonomy of guitar series and the like. The best way to approach it is probably by introducing small changes over time rather than one major change all at once. This seems like a good first step, so rather than trying to solve every question at once, maybe we roll this out and see what the response is? Sorry for the long, confusing response, but I really don't know where to start (and stop) with this stuff. \m/ DeeJayKTalk! 13:59, May 9, 2016 (UTC) :Thank you for your very constructive feedback! Your flow of ideas is very fluid, I've read it with great pleasure. The main idea of my Great Master PlanTM is precisely to get rid of the whole Portal navigation. Simply because it works EXACTLY the same way as categories, so we have to work on it twice, and Portal+Categories navigation make things confusing for "normal users". Contrary to what you say (sorry) the categories are the heart & soul of every wiki on Earth. Everything rotates around them, thus the fundamental role they play in terms of navigation. This Ibanez wiki is also the only wiki I've seen so far where categories are disabled for unregistered users and that was a very, very bad move right from the start :/ :There's is also one more aspect not to neglect about categories, and it makes ALL the difference: a category is an auto-generated list of links. Basically. And this wiki stands to this very definition. But nothing on Earth can prevent us from editing the category "main text section" to add some significant content in it -keeping the usual batch of links right below, of course. :I will not edit the index page right now -keep your tar and feathers for later :) This sandbox remains here to trial&error things. But first I will try to show how good, how user-friendly (yessir) the categories can be when properly designed. And don't worry about your Portal:2012, it will not disappear (far from it): it also has a great role to play in my Great Master PlanTM! :About the very similar Guitar series/Guitar models categories (the most important ones, like you said) I've had the same reflection, idem with the 3 other minor categories (parts/view/universe). The whole thing doesn't bother me since with a few easy tweaks, the aforementioned "Ibanez serials" and "Ibanez suffixes" (i.e. the most important pages here) will be able to shine again. I just need a little time to design the whole concept properly, I am quite confident in my vision -and everything can be reverted to its original state to avoid any drama but I can safely say that won't happen ;) --KainTGC (talk) 15:08, May 9, 2016 (UTC) ::I'm glad you've got a "grand vision" because every time I try to envision something I end up getting bogged down in the details. I'll wait to see what you have in mind before making any major changes to the main page. At some point I expect that we'll need to get a living administrator to do some things (e.g. if we want to alter the contents of the tabbed top nav thingy). ::You've got a good point that content can be added to category pages, but I would caution against going to far in that direction and sacrificing the true intent of category pages (which in my experience are almost universally just lists of links sometimes with a short expository introduction). To me, the real value of the (yet stillborn) "portal" pages is that they can provide a more "curated" navigational structure. Of course the corresponding disadvantage (as you point out) is that the portals would require more "hands on" maintenance. However, I'll keep an open mind until I see what you come up with. ::In terms of calling attention to the "important pages", I had the idea that maybe an FAQ page could provide some benefit there. I might work on that if I run out of other things to keep me busy. ::Lastly, I'll re-iterate that I would suggest the changes be made iteratively rather than all at once (where possible) to minimize the blow-back that generally comes with change. \m/ DeeJayKTalk! 22:58, May 9, 2016 (UTC) :::Here I go, a few categories have been edited to give a taste of my whole project: starting from my Ibanez Wiki Sandbox we click on the first link, the most important one, the big red icon which is Category:Guitar series. On this page you see 2 lines of text to briefly sum up the content of this category, then a nice table with all Guitar series currently running in 2016. So far I only made 2 links leading to the Category:RGA models and Category:Talman models as an example -2016 work needs to be done first :) :::These RGA/Talman categories keep the providential link which leads to the full literature about the RGA and the Talman history, then a nice table with their respective 2016 models, directly inspired by your Portal:2012. :::On a side note, I also disabled the Category Gallery that usually shows 8 random pages with images (like the Category:Parts that is fugly. :::You see it's not a tremendous amount of content that was added to these categories, and they all keep their true initial function, that is to list a few sub-categories and tons of links. This content is nothing more than a little help to give the reader a good direction to start with. To be honest my Great Master PlanTM is big words that make people sh!t their pants but it's far from being a revolution: the idea is simply to bring the categories back to the front (right from my Ibanez Index Sandbox), then make people move from categories to categories with useful indications 'till they land on the desired page. Nothing more. --KainTGC (talk) 00:57, May 10, 2016 (UTC) ::::If nothing else this is a good first step toward making the wiki a bit more navigable. Good effort here. \m/ DeeJayKTalk! 18:40, May 10, 2016 (UTC) :::::I noticed something today as I was looking at the wiki from my phone: the "Big picture" menu that your proposal removes is actually more functional on a tiny screen than the row of icons. This surprised me as it's a bit counter intuitive, but on the phone the four images from the "big picture" menu organized themselves neatly into a 2 by 2 grid which were visible all at once (not one at a time as in a desktop browser). Meanwhile the icon bar maintained its horizontal alignment and I had to scroll over in the browser to see beyond the first two icons. This was on a small screen (4.6") Android device using Google's Chrome browser. :::::While I'm sure this issue could be overcome by using some more responsive container for the icon bar, as it stands my preference would be to retain the "big picture" menu if the goal of this endeavor is to make the site more usable from small screens. :::::Also, the more I think about it and look at your test pages, I'm still having trouble understanding the value you see in using categories vs. portals. Yes, the content is already there in the categories, but beyond that I don't see a lot of pluses. As far as that goes, categories can easily be leveraged to create similar content in the portal pages. For example, look at Portal:2005, which I haven't touched. The page itself consists of nothing more than a call to a template (fewer than 50 characters of code) and yet the page displays the content of three categories which are germane to that year. Yes, it's not particularly pretty, but that's something we can work on — and most of the work would be to the template itself, meaning once we alter it there, it cascades to ALL the pages using that template. The other generic portal pages are built using the same approach, and would similarly not be all that difficult to tweak at a global level. :::::That said, the approach you have come up with to clean up the categories has merits of its own. There's nothing to say we can't have both portals and categories. Obviously, a vote for portals is really a vote for both, as the categories are core to the wiki and are not going anywhere. If I get some focused time, I'll try to present a case for portals by way of example. \m/ DeeJayKTalk! 21:16, May 11, 2016 (UTC) ::::::I've just tried to browse the site with my not-so-smart-phone and its ridiculously small 3"5 screen: I can confirm that the "big picture menu" works way better than the icons. We'll definitely keep it, it looks better on the PC screen and works well with phones. ::::::I'm quite sad you still support the portal concept. We have spent days working with categories, subcategories and tons of connections and structure matters, I would have expected you to fall in love with my lovely categories :) I do know that it's easy to populate portals using templates and a few tricks, but it remains a raw list of links. That's not what I call "main content" for a page. ::::::Almost ten years ago I've been working on a wiki about a video game, a MMORPG (Trickster Online not to name it). At that time we faced EXACTLY the same structure issues, that is to have links-only-categories one the one hand, and nice hand-made pages on the other hand. It was hell on earth to make connections every time for every quest, map, monster, item, etc. Then we found the DEFINITE answer and that was to merge the hand-made-pages inside the category ones. Two examples: ::::::*Category:Quests by Location ::::::*Category:Caballa Relics Quest ::::::(The server is so bad that pages take hours to load, sorry) but you can see on the 1st page the nice table and the subcategories & links below. On the 2nd page, you barely notice it's a category since the page is quite long and filled with comprehensive, human readable contents (the whole wiki works like this, not only those 2 pages). Categories are the skeleton, the roadmap of the wiki providing a hierarchy of information, they also fit of links at their bottom of course, but they can be "real pages" with "real content" as well, like this video game wiki. ::::::Following this logic, I would cut the whole content of the S series page, and paste it to the Category:S models. So we will not have to put "See also S models" and "For a comprehensive article about S series, click some more": just ONE page for EVERYTHING about the S series. ::::::Portal on the other hand will remain (well-prepared) lists of links (Portal:2005 best example ever), but I don't think people are fond of such raw lists. Now you can try your best to convince me about portals, who knows (you can also give examples from another wiki if you will) but I'm really convinced about Category >>>>> all --KainTGC (talk) 22:47, May 11, 2016 (UTC) :::::::Please don't take my comments on your "category first" strategy to be a disparagement of your work. The changes you've proposed and already made in the categories are all to the good, whether we eventually decide to build out the portal concept or dump it entirely. My mind remains open to your ideas and I merely wanted to keep the discussion of the eventual path of the site navigation open. I expect at some point we will find some logical way to improve site navigation that somehow melds both of our strategies. I'm a big believer in the value of smart template use to simplify and impose and enforce order in a wiki. For now, this whole thing remains simmering on my back burner while other things take precedence. :::::::I'll take a look at the way things are organized on your Trickster wiki as well as try to see if I can find any other wikis that have particularly strong organizational/ navigational structures already in place. No sense in "reinventing the wheel" if there's an elegant solution we can borrow. \m/ DeeJayKTalk! 16:17, May 12, 2016 (UTC) ::::::::Sorry for my message of yesterday which was a bit harsh -not to say rude- about portals. It was stupid on my part to close the door to something that we haven't put much efforts into, so far, and that may find its own use in the future. You have carte blanche on portals and rest assured I won't bash it anymore. And I will change my mind for sure if the results exceed the expectations -but you don't have to prove me ANYTHING: the good old trial-and-error philosophy, etc ;) Sorry again. --KainTGC (talk) 17:02, May 12, 2016 (UTC) No need at all to apologize. It's going to take a lot more than than to offend me. ;) I just want to keep an open mind to the possibilities at this point. \m/ DeeJayKTalk! 18:18, May 12, 2016 (UTC)